Down in the basement, Alfonzo continued to wander in the fluorescent half-light. He skirted decomposing bankers boxes. He moved the standing fan around so that it blew on various wet spots on the floor. He persevered as the sole animal who knew the system’s quirks, the tricks of the labyrinth that held the institutional memory of the city.
As was the dynamic, his best friend, Mitchell Cusco, who worked upstairs, tried to cheer him up. This anonymity was not a burden but a boon, and Alfonzo should cherish it. Think, Mitchell enthused, what Alfonzo could accomplish unwatched, unbothered, and surrounded by the rich history of the city. Use this opportunity to finish your dissertation, Mitchell cajoled.
Alfonzo was not just a worker, he was a stalled scholar who had been “all but dissertation” for a long while. ABD were his letters of shame. But it wasn’t that he hadn’t written a dissertation. Quite the opposite. It was that he had written too much of one.
The tale of Alfonzo the academic could be told in many ways. A cruel version might go: long-haired deadbeat pens left-wing trash while feeding at the public trough. The more charitable version could be: local kid makes good, juggles day job and night classes to honor the memory of his departed mother.
Alfonzo didn’t know which version of himself rang truer. He was a left-wing-trash alpaca. He was the son of a local and an immigrant, and in this he fit some archetype. His father, Luis, was a quintessential outer-borough animal. He never left his borough and proclaimed that theirs was the best city in the world. Alfonzo’s mother, Gina, had been born in the Andes. She and her parents had made the difficult journey from the Bolivian Altiplano to the city when she was very little. Both parents had been patriots and thinkers in their own ways. His mother, during her life, had venerated little things like getting the I VOTED sticker every few years. His father put great stock in home ownership. He felt that their home in Ozone Park was key to belonging. Luis had a square of grass of his own, and it was surrounded on all sides by layer upon layer of labor, immigration, history, and industry. Besides his lawn, Alfonzo’s father put all his faith in the acquisition and maintenance of a public-sector job with a good pension. This outsized ego mixed with a strong desire for safety, Alfonzo thought, was very Queens.
Alfonzo wanted something different than his parents: not status or land, but intellectual stimulation. He wanted to become Professor Velloso Faca, an intellectual powerhouse who laid bare class struggles and identity formation to undergrad flocks. He dreamed of writing incisive theoretical texts that managed to be both sophisticated and humorous. Alfonzo had devoted all these years to a dissertation that would tease out the myth of empire from the unwashed raw wool of reality. When he tried explaining this to Mitchell, his friend said it sounded muddled but brave.
Alfonzo’s dissertation was a text dedicated to the struggles of Vicugna pacos, his species. And all that stood between him and a PhD was a conclusion he could not write.
That morning just before waking, Alfonzo had had a dream. The dream was of a single sheet of paper bearing the words The End. For some reason it was this that stirred him to action after so many seasons of floundering. He decided that today he was going to take a bold action. Humming a prayer to the clouds, Alfonzo slid a disk into his machine. He created a new page. This page he would slot in at the end of the text but before his nosenotes and footnotes. This was the page he’d been avoiding, but he was done procrastinating.
On the blank page he wrote the following:
Conclusion:
The End.
And that was it, a bold action. Alfonzo clicked send. Through wires the file moved from processer to printer. The page emerged from the slot, and he checked it over. With that complete, he went back to the beginning. The rest of the text remained to be printed. He sent the full file TEXT.DIVERSION878 to the Aztek Howtek printer. The daisy wheel began to whir.
It was a long job and the machine was old, but he had a faith that came from his subconscious. Today was the day. He listened closely as the printer sputtered and coughed in a kind of mechanical throat clearing. From the machine’s gray slot, the first of his 1,532 pages slipped out. He was done being a cog. Now was the time for change. Alfonzo thrilled as he read his title arranged across the white page.
DISSERTATION
FROM ROAMING THE ALTIPLANO TO SUPPLYING THE GARMENT DISTRICT: A MOOKONIAN PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC REVERIE ON THE CAMELID DIASPORA OF THE NEW YORK METROPOLITAN AREA
Submitted by Alfonzo Velloso Faca
Department of Pan-American Studies
In partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Mammalian Philosophy
Hunter College
New York, New York
4.
Because his father hadn’t been to college, let alone grad school, Alfonzo had a lot of anxiety and guilt. This difference between their experiences could curdle into resentment in the stomachs of both father and son. Luis sometimes called Alfonzo “Dr. Egg.” Alfonzo sometimes snorted when his father mispronounced things and squirmed when Luis loud-talked to waitresses. Alfonzo wished to prove his father’s way of life wrong but at the same time win his respect. He wanted to convince his whole family that intellectual work was work. And when it came to Hunter, Alfonzo wanted to show the fancier students he was quick enough to triumph in the perpetual fight of academia.
Alfonzo chafed at academic norms but still tried to behave right. The frisson of class resentment, the desire to understand and elucidate, kept him motivated for a long time. This clash of feeling had carried him through his formative years of fancy liberal arts undergrad and partway through his PhD. The scholarship to Hapshire had changed his life, and he was still struggling to realize the potential he supposedly had. It was at Hapshire that he’d met and fallen for Vivi, and there he’d been exposed to ideas and work that changed his brain chemistry, stomach flora, and sense of what was possible.
But this energy had dissipated. His mother had died after he completed his comps, and the old motivating anger turned to amorphous grief. Who was he mad at? The metaphorical father was the easy answer, but his real father had turned gray and frail. Alfonzo found he couldn’t stay furious with a widower alpaca whose wool hung around his body like a thin layer of melancholic smoke.
When he’d first accepted his job at City Hall, Alfonzo told himself that he was smarter than his grad school peers with their loans and free time. Though it would take longer to complete his degree, eventually he would emerge from his cocoon as a fluttering professor-monarch with understanding of both the public sector and academia. He was no slouch.
But the fact was, he envied his classmates. They finished their degrees, while he plodded behind. He was jealous of those who went to summer programs and on research trips. But he was also furious that his school favored the more privileged in so many large and small ways, while at the same time presenting itself as a bastion of lefty, emancipatory values. When he grew tired of the trap, Alfonzo would look away from school toward his childhood friends. He felt jealous of their relaxed states, their badly-thought-out politics. They seemed to be able to just enjoy the kind of life he’d trained himself to ruthlessly deconstruct.
He could rage at the classist snobbery of the university using discourse he’d acquired there. This erudite grumbling did nothing productive. His school colleagues thought him bitter; his old friends thought him a snob. Neither group was really wrong. He hated the shape he’d taken on. To cope, Alfonzo had put his head down and worked. And this was how he had come to produce a 1,532-page-long dissertation.